


I'm Reaching for you But you're too Far Away

by thefrenchmistake



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: Cheating, Episode: s14e15 Truth or Dare, Fix-It of Sorts, Night Terrors, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 23:34:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23785585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrenchmistake/pseuds/thefrenchmistake
Summary: It goes like this.The calls come in the middle of the night, every night, without fault.It comes to a point where Will doesn’t even mind anymore.
Relationships: Jennifer "JJ" Jareau & Spencer Reid, Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/Spencer Reid, Jennifer "JJ" Jareau/William LaMontagne Jr.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 132





	I'm Reaching for you But you're too Far Away

It goes like this.

The calls come in the middle of the night, every night, without fault.

It comes to a point where Will doesn’t even _mind_ anymore.

How could he mind ? His wife almost dies everyday, goes to work without knowing if she’ll come back, and she’s here. She’s in their bed, she takes care of their children and she kisses him good morning.

But at night ?

He wakes up to either her ringtone (he knows it by heart by now) or her tears, or her hushed whispers coming from the bathroom or the kitchen.

Will can’t exactly says he truly gets it, because how could he ? But he understands, to a certain extent. He understands more than he should, because he pulls her close when he gets the chance, he kisses her with fear when she goes into the office, and he looks at their children and wonders-wonders what it would be like, to raise them without JJ, to live in a world she isn’t in anymore.

So he understands.

The first time it happens, it’s not even a ringtone that wakes him; it’s knocks on the door. JJ seems to have had an extremely stressful day despite the light atmosphere of the wedding, and she’s laid down in bed, groaning, so he gets down and opens the door with a fogged mind and squinted eyes. 

There is no mistaking the panic-driven intruder in the doorway.

“I’m so sorry Will, I’m sorry, is…”

The guy seems so goddamn frantic it makes Will stare at him, at his hands passing in his hair and the anxiety radiating off him and the bags under his eyes and he opens his mouth.

“It’s cool, man. What…”

“Spence ?”

And there it is, all over his face, when he looks above Will’s head and meets JJ’s eyes, something beyond relief that knocks the wind out of the profiler. Spencer enters past him, urges towards her and engulfs her into a hug so fierce Will can see the tension in his back from where he stands.

“I thought you were gone, that he shot, I though he shot…”

“Hey, It’s ok, I’m right here.”

JJ buries her face in the crook of his neck, and Will simply closes the door.

That night, Spencer and his wife spend talking on the couch while Will simply goes back to bed, leaving them to their confessions and worst fears. 

This makes him wonder what happened, exactly. He knows bits and pieces, but… Well, danger is kind of in the job’s description, so she doesn’t really offer details on what happens at work expect when it’s a good day or a very, very bad one. She seemed alright during the wedding, if a bit tense and distant, but that’s an occurrence with Jennifer whenever she doesn’t know how to handle some events.

So he doesn’t know.

On the other hand, he isn’t sure he wants to know (she almost got shot, and those simple words make dread seep into his veins).

Then it’s almost every night; Spencer stops coming by the house, but the calls are recurrent.

And then JJ doesn’t go to sleep right away, doesn’t go to sleep at the same time he does. She waits for the call, or even calls herself. And sometimes, he wakes up in the dead of the night to her tears and her choked whispers and he gets up, worried sick.

She is often on the floor, in the bathroom adjacent to their room, or on the couch, but each time she is crying and clutching the phone to her ear, repeating endlessly:

“I thought he shot you, I thought you were gone, I…”

So he often turns around and goes back to bed, pretends to sleep when her shivering body lays down in the sheets and she wraps them around her instead of wrapping around him. Or he goes watch his boys sleep for a little while, just a little while, watches their chests rise and fall and avoids thinking about all that is wrong in their lives.

The fact is that he’s not enough for her, not when her job is to watch people die and struggle to prevent it (they never win; you can’t win at this job). So yes, he knows he isn’t enough for her, because he is only a man, a husband, a father. She seems to need more, she seems to need a partner; and not anyone.

No. Not anyone.

It kills him, not to be able to help her panicked mind when she awakes in a jolt, when she calls for her best friend and fights against his arms because she’s shaking and the only thing that can calm her down is hearing Spencer’s voice or seeing him alive and standing, not with a bullet in his head or whatever dreadful scenes she witnesses in her night terrors.

It kills him.

His wife is worth every fucking thing in this world, she is worth everything she wants and she cannot settle down for anything less.

He knows some wouldn’t understand, but the thing is that what he has with Jennifer is more than what couples have; it’s devotion. And he wants to see her get everything she wants, because she deserves it, even if it’s not him. So he lets her go, even though he knows where she goes and what she does, because she comes back every time.

And he plays blind for now, because he saw in Spencer’s eyes the same thing he sees every day in the mirror; unconditional devotion.

It goes like this.

The calls become a necessary fixture in her life, to assure herself that the nightmare of the bullet in his brains and the blood on her hands is just that, a nightmare. They ignore the truth she spilled under pressure, because there are more urgent matters at hand, like trying to sleep without waking up drenched in sweat and bile in their throat because they saw their partner die in front of them.

And there is something indeed in the pit of her stomach, something akin to a sense of guilt towards Will, but she’ll do whatever it takes to feel better, to crawl out of that panic-hole she’s stuck into, and she needs Spence to do that. She needs to hear the low timbre of his voice at the darkest hours, needs him to soothe her patiently, needs him to say the names of the unsubs she saw in her dreams and tell her they’re dead, or locked up, that they can’t hurt them anymore.

So, the calls become natural, the first thing she does when she wakes up in the night, hand already on the phone and feet already bringing her to the living room.

Sometimes, they don’t even cry, they just talk.

And soon, talking isn’t enough.

He breaks her heart, when his voice echoes in her phone and he’s crying and confessing things he would never confess if they weren’t both lost in the fog of fear and loss and trauma. He breaks her heart, because Spence is tragically romantic, even as Maeve, whatever she was to him, died in front of him, even as the world crushed him down and pushed him towards despair. He is a romantic, and it might be the worst thing that happened to him.

Jennifer, on the other hand, despite the looks of her life, is a cynical.

And one night, she just… takes her keys and drives to his apartment.

The door opens, and his features don’t hold a trace of sleep.

He steps aside without any surprise and she supposes that, yes, it’s been coming for a long time.

They talk and talk and hold hands and brush their fingers against the other’s cheeks and they smile sadly and wipe tears away.

JJ goes back home with something in her chest, steady and burning like the sun, something that makes her feel brighter and saner and more anchored in her life.

She kisses her sons’ foreheads, taking the time to breathe and realize how lucky she is to have them.

Slipping into the bed without a sound, she places her phone on the nightstand.

The next morning, she feels more well-rested than she has in months.So she does it again, going to see Spencer in the morning or the afternoon or in the middle of the night. She never lies to Will, but he never asks where she goes either.

The sad, resigned looks he sends her when she’s already in the doorway makes her think that he doesn’t ask because he doesn’t want to know. Maybe he’s right.

Because, although they don’t kiss and don’t fuck, what they do feels far more intimate than anything she does with Will.

And so it begins.

It goes like this.

Spencer is familiar with elation as a scientific reaction that leads the brain to release dopamine inside the body. He did not, however, had the chance to feel and recognize it for what it was a lot in his life. The first time was when he became a profiler.

The second, when he realized for real that these people he worked alongside every day were his family (around a cake and candles that wouldn’t die down).

And the third is now, JJ’s lips pushing back on his like she is as desperate to taste him as he her, hands on his neck and nails digging into his skin (he doesn’t mind the pain).

Elation -what a small word, for such a big feeling. Her jaw works under his hand, which flexes around her throat when her hands pull at his hair. The answering gasp against his mouth makes his brains go a-wire. Her thighs tighten around his hips and fuck, if it was up to him he’d get her clothes off right here. She grinds against him and it’s all he can do not to completely lose control, so he pulls back a little, ignoring her plaintive whine.

“Wait, wait, Will, and…”

“I don’t care,” she lies between furious kisses; and then she repeats it like a mantra (it might be to convince herself, because they both know she cares, far too much to get out of this undamaged) and she doesn’t stop kissing him.

He responds in kind, accepting her lie like the Holy Word, because he’ll give her whatever she needs and take whatever small piece of herself he has yet to discover.

If he was a better person, he might turn around and leave; the fact is that he isn’t, hasn’t been for a long time.

When you see what he sees, understand what he does, there is no way to go but down. Because he knows, contrary to most of his colleagues, the un-subs’s passions, obsessions, sickness intimately, not from outside. He knows it from inside, from the depths of their diseased brains and he can see the horrors they commit in the name of the god they make of themselves.

When he kneels in front of her, it’s not wrapped in fear and sadness, it’s anticipation running through his body like a drug, it’s intense like nothing he’s ever experienced outside his job.

It’s her smiling down at him and his lips on her thigh and her hand in his hair and the sounds that escape her aren’t sounds of pain or tears like he so often hears, but sounds he wouldn’t mind listening to for the rest of his life.

And when she kneels, it’s not because an un-sub is forcing her to reveal her darkest secrets, but she whispers them all the same against his ribs and his side and then neck and lips.

He swallows her confessions so they won’t hurt anyone, then it’s just skin on skin and the beginning of something they know can’t be avoided.

It goes like this.

“Does he know that you love me ?”

Laying on her side with his hand tangled in her hair, she looks up at Spencer wide-eyed. Their legs are still intertwined between his and the sheets cover them, yet his eyes don’t hold any accusation, his words don’t pretend to be an obligation or a demand of any sort.

“Yeah. Yeah, he does,” she finally whispers.

Spencer simply nods, still looking at her, and then he leans forward just enough to kiss her. It’s gentle and patient and reassuring altogether, not at all possessive or jealous, and that’s one of the reasons she loves this man so much, has loved him so long through everything.

And she knows.

It goes like this.

“Will ?”

He closes his eyes, because this is it, and he knows, he’s been preparing himself for months, but his lungs still shrink and he blinks a few times before turning around.

Her eyes are shining.

“We need to talk.”


End file.
